Now, I’m at the party and I can’t find Candice, so I hang around, by the keg, talk to the DJ. Go to the bathroom but some asshole has thrown up all over the floor and I’m about to leave when I bump into Paul Denton, who’s walking down the hallway, and I vaguely remember talking to him last night, and I nod to him as I’m walking away from the vomit-covered toilet, but he walks up to me and says, “Oh, I’m so sorry about tonight.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
“Did you stay?” he asks me.
“Stay? Yeah,” I say. Whatever. “I stayed.”
“God, I’m really sorry,” he says.
“Listen, it’s okay. It really is,” I tell him.
“I’ve got to make it up to you,” he’s telling me.
“Okay. Sure,” I say. “I’ve gotta take a leak, okay?”
“Oh sure. I’ll wait,” he smiles.
After pissing off the vomit from the toilet seat I head back down the hall and Denton’s still standing there with a fresh beer for me. I thank him, what else can I do, and we walk back to the living room where these asshole frat guys from Dartmouth have crashed the party. I have no idea how the fuck they got onto campus. Security must have let them in as a joke. So these stupid rich frat guys all dressed up in Brooks Brothers come up to me while I’m waiting for Denton to get another beer and one of them asks me, “What’s going on?”
“Not much,” I tell him. It’s the truth.
“Where’s that Dressed To Get Screwed party?” one of them asks.
“That’s not until later,” I tell him.
“Tonight?” the same one asks.
“Next term,” I lie.
“Oh shit man. We thought this was The Dressed To Get Screwed party,” they say, really disappointed.
“It looks like a Halloween party if you ask me,” one of them says.
“Freaks,” one of them says, looking around, shaking his head. “Freaks.”
“Sorry, guys,” I say.
Denton comes back with a beer and hands it to me and we all talk. They get really excited when the D.J. spins old Sam Cooke and one of them grabs a not-bad-looking Freshman and dances with her when “Twisting the Night Away” comes on. It makes me sick. The remaining Dartmouth jerks do a little frat handshake. They’re all wearing green for some reason. Denton’s looking at them closely and asks, “Aren’t you all a little far away?”
“It’s not that far a ride,” one of them says.
Then Denton asks, “Well, what’s it like on the outside?”
It’s pretty weak that Denton’s even acknowledging these jerks but I don’t say anything.
“It’s cool,” one of them says, eyeing some ugly girl. Our student body president.
“You guys are really in the middle of nowhere,” one of the more brilliant ones says.
Denton laughs and says, “Kind of.”
“Hanover’s a real sprawling metropolis,” I mutter loudly.
“I swear this looks like a fuckin’ Halloween party,” one of them says again and they’re pissing me off and okay, maybe it does look like one but it doesn’t give these assholes any right, so I have to tell them, “No, it’s not a Halloween party. It’s the Get Fucked party.”
“Oh yeah?” They all raise their eyes up and nudge each other. “We’re ready.”
“Yeah. Bend over and get fucked,” I find myself saying.
They look at me like I’m crazy and walk off telling me how “perverted” I am. I don’t even know why I bothered to say that. I look over at Denton and he’s laughing, but when he sees that I’m not, he stops. It gets late and Candice is nowhere to be found and the keg runs out. Denton says why don’t we go to his room since he has beer there. And I’m a little wasted so I say why not. I make sure I bring the pot I picked up earlier this afternoon when I was at Roxanne’s scoring for some Freshman girls in McCullough. We leave the party and head for Welling.
PAUL After we returned from our little excursion to the hospital, I went back to my room and wondered what I should do. I first called Casa Miguel and had Sean paged. He wasn’t there. He had already left. I sat on my bed and smoked a couple of cigarettes. I then went to The Pub, cautiously at first. I didn’t look around the room until I had made my way to the bar. Harry was already there, recovered, getting even more smashed by the jukebox with David Van Pelt. I got a beer, but didn’t drink it, then followed some people over to Booth (it was getting too cold for parties at End of the World) to confront Sean. It was a party, after all.
The party was in full-swing when I got there. Raymond was standing around but I didn’t want to talk to him. He came over anyway and asked if I wanted a drink.
“Yeah.” I craned my neck to look over the dance floor.
“What do you want? I know the bartender.”
“Rum and anything.”
He walked off and then I spotted Sean. From where I stood in the darkened living room of Booth I could see him in the light coming from the bathroom down the hallway. He was standing in the doorway and had a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other and he was trying to kick something off his boot. He saw me for an instant and then shyly turned away. I was feeling guilty about our meeting last night — telling him I had failed three classes last term. I only told him that because I thought he was great-looking and I wanted to sleep with him. I hadn’t failed any classes that term. (Sean later admitted to me that he had failed all four. In fact, I couldn’t imagine anyone failing not only four classes at Camden, but even one. I guess the thought seemed so irrational to me that I found him even more attractive in some perverse way.) He had been coming on to me the night before, there was no doubt about that and that’s all that really mattered. From where I stood he looked a little like a rock star caught unknowingly in a video. Maybe a little like Bryan Adams (without the acne scars, though, sometimes, admittedly, that can be sexy). I went over to him and told him how sorry I was.
“Yeah,” he said, looking modestly at the ground, still trying to kick something off his boots. I wondered suddenly if he was Catholic. My spirits rose: Catholic boys will usually do anything. “I’m sorry too.”
“Did you stay there?” I asked him.
“Stay there? Yeah, I guess,” he admitted, embarrassed, confused. “I stayed.”
“I’m really, really sorry,” I said.
“Oh, don’t worry about it. It’s okay. Some other time,” he said.
I felt so shitty about ruining his date that a rush of sympathy (or horniness: the two were interchangeable) went through me and I said, “I’ll make it up to you.”
“You don’t have to,” he said, though you could tell he had not wanted to say that.
“I know I don’t, but I want to. I really insist.”
He looked down and said he had to use the restroom and I said I’d wait.
I wondered if we were going to sleep together tonight, but then I tried to push the thought away and pretended to be rational about the whole thing. In the meantime, four gorgeous Dartmouth guys came into the party. When I went back to the keg to get another beer for Sean (if nothing else, I was going to succeed in getting him drunk) they all walked over to him and started a conversation. Jealously I hurried back. When I handed him the beer, almost protectively, the one that was the best-looking went off dancing with the student body president (“The Vagina Lady,” Raymond always seemed to call her). The Dartmouth boys thought that this was the annual Dressed To Get Screwed party and they were quite disappointed that they had driven all the way from Hanover to come to the Camden Early Halloween Ball. They said this sarcastically and I thought it was a little mean. But I asked them, flirtatiously, “Aren’t you all a little far away?”